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SBIRS Exceeds Budget, Schedule Plans, GAO Says
Development of the U.S. Space-Based Infrared System for tracking enemy missiles has cost billions of dollars more than planned and is years beyond its original schedule, the Government Accountability Office said yesterday (see GSN, July 10). The Defense Department began the program in 1996. It expected to spend $4.2 billion to deploy SBIRS satellites by 2004, according to a GAO document. “However, over the past 11 years, SBIRS has proven to be technically challenging and substantially more costly. In an effort to stem cost increases and schedule delays, DOD has restructured the program multiple times, including revising program goals,” GAO acquisition and sourcing management chief Cristina Chaplain said in a letter to the ranking members of the House and Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittees. The project is now expected to cost more than $10.4 billion, with the first satellite launched next year, Chaplain stated. “Since its inception, SBIRS has been burdened by immature technologies, unclear requirements, unstable funding, underestimated software complexity, poor oversight, and other problems,” she said. It has been more than a year since the program was last restructured, but it “still faces challenges in meeting cost, schedule and performance goals.” The Government Accountability Office also expressed doubts about the Alternative Infrared Satellite System program, which began in 2006 “to compete with SBIRS and ensure that the nation’s missile-warning and defense capabilities are sustained, or possibly provide a follow-on capability to SBIRS.” The Air Force has not allowed enough time for developing the system before the scheduled 2015 launch of the first satellite, the letter says. The program might also be “optimistic in its assumptions about technology risk,” according to Chaplain. Data from a planned 2010 launch of a small-scale demonstration satellite would not be ready in time to provide information on development of the first full-scale satellite, she added. The GAO letter calls for the Pentagon to “reassess its investment in AIRSS and [to find] alternative ways of reducing the risk posed by the SBIRS program, to … assure the current missile-warning and defense capabilities are sustained” (U.S. Government Accountability Office letter, Sept. 12).
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